37,213 research outputs found
Locality in Network Optimization
In probability theory and statistics notions of correlation among random
variables, decay of correlation, and bias-variance trade-off are fundamental.
In this work we introduce analogous notions in optimization, and we show their
usefulness in a concrete setting. We propose a general notion of correlation
among variables in optimization procedures that is based on the sensitivity of
optimal points upon (possibly finite) perturbations. We present a canonical
instance in network optimization (the min-cost network flow problem) that
exhibits locality, i.e., a setting where the correlation decays as a function
of the graph-theoretical distance in the network. In the case of warm-start
reoptimization, we develop a general approach to localize a given optimization
routine in order to exploit locality. We show that the localization mechanism
is responsible for introducing a bias in the original algorithm, and that the
bias-variance trade-off that emerges can be exploited to minimize the
computational complexity required to reach a prescribed level of error
accuracy. We provide numerical evidence to support our claims
Community Detection from Location-Tagged Networks
Many real world systems or web services can be represented as a network such
as social networks and transportation networks. In the past decade, many
algorithms have been developed to detect the communities in a network using
connections between nodes. However in many real world networks, the locations
of nodes have great influence on the community structure. For example, in a
social network, more connections are established between geographically
proximate users. The impact of locations on community has not been fully
investigated by the research literature. In this paper, we propose a community
detection method which takes locations of nodes into consideration. The goal is
to detect communities with both geographic proximity and network closeness. We
analyze the distribution of the distances between connected and unconnected
nodes to measure the influence of location on the network structure on two real
location-tagged social networks. We propose a method to determine if a
location-based community detection method is suitable for a given network. We
propose a new community detection algorithm that pushes the location
information into the community detection. We test our proposed method on both
synthetic data and real world network datasets. The results show that the
communities detected by our method distribute in a smaller area compared with
the traditional methods and have the similar or higher tightness on network
connections
System Level Synthesis
This article surveys the System Level Synthesis framework, which presents a
novel perspective on constrained robust and optimal controller synthesis for
linear systems. We show how SLS shifts the controller synthesis task from the
design of a controller to the design of the entire closed loop system, and
highlight the benefits of this approach in terms of scalability and
transparency. We emphasize two particular applications of SLS, namely
large-scale distributed optimal control and robust control. In the case of
distributed control, we show how SLS allows for localized controllers to be
computed, extending robust and optimal control methods to large-scale systems
under practical and realistic assumptions. In the case of robust control, we
show how SLS allows for novel design methodologies that, for the first time,
quantify the degradation in performance of a robust controller due to model
uncertainty -- such transparency is key in allowing robust control methods to
interact, in a principled way, with modern techniques from machine learning and
statistical inference. Throughout, we emphasize practical and efficient
computational solutions, and demonstrate our methods on easy to understand case
studies.Comment: To appear in Annual Reviews in Contro
The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale
The common wisdom is that distributed transactions do not scale. But what if
distributed transactions could be made scalable using the next generation of
networks and a redesign of distributed databases? There would be no need for
developers anymore to worry about co-partitioning schemes to achieve decent
performance. Application development would become easier as data placement
would no longer determine how scalable an application is. Hardware provisioning
would be simplified as the system administrator can expect a linear scale-out
when adding more machines rather than some complex sub-linear function, which
is highly application specific.
In this paper, we present the design of our novel scalable database system
NAM-DB and show that distributed transactions with the very common Snapshot
Isolation guarantee can indeed scale using the next generation of RDMA-enabled
network technology without any inherent bottlenecks. Our experiments with the
TPC-C benchmark show that our system scales linearly to over 6.5 million
new-order (14.5 million total) distributed transactions per second on 56
machines.Comment: 12 page
- …